God: Trish's Church and Manufactured Meaning

I've PRObably made it clear already that I don't think Meaning can be manufactured (so the title of this article is intended to be a little tongue-in-cheek). Meaning comes from our encounters with Real Truth, and therefor anything we can Construct must inherently be other than Real Truth and, therefor, not a source of real Meaning.

To recap: the Constructed reality is USEFUL, while unconstructed Real Truth is MEANINGFUL. One is one, the other is the other.

Okay. Now we're back to Trish's church which, as I have said, presents me with a challenge.

When I say Trish's church, I don't mean her ideal philosophically perfect one. I mean the one here in Tulsa that she decided she liked, and that we both attend. It's...it's either Memorial Drive Church of Christ or Memorial Road Church of Christ. Whichever one ISN'T in Edmond.

Anyway. They have, I think, a pretty good example of exactly what I think a church service shouldn't be. It's a manufactured experience, a rigorously scripted spectacle of worship. It involves the audience, draws them in, makes them feel like they've been in the presence of God (all those things I talked about two posts ago).

It's not extreme. It's not an extremely liberal Church of Christ, which means it's definitely not an extremely liberal Protestant church. I've seen worse. There's nothing particularly unpleasant about Memorial's service, even to someone who grew up in very conservative churches, as I did.

I'm pretty sure Nicki (and Kris?) and Toby (and Gwyn?) all disliked it for the liberalness of it, mainly. That aspect of it did make me slightly uncomfortable, but not much. What got to me was the....

Well, it's like this: they have a praise team. That's a liberal thing, that gets to people. What bothers me about it, though, is not that there are women leading singing or that we're approaching the sinful idolatry of having a choir...it's just the scripted aspect. I don't like for a church service to be manufactured even as much as every single worship service IS, and when you start trying to coordinate eight people just for the song leading, you start manufacturing down to the nitty gritty.

Last Sunday I noticed that three of the four prayers seemed to have been written by the Worship Leader (the Captain of the Praise Team, and coordinator of the rest of the worship service) and handed out to the men saying prayers so that they'd better fit with the theme of the service. That MAY have been a misperception on my part (it's not like there was a byline in the prayer), but it certainly seemed that way.

Now...the minister is an exception. I have appreciated every word I've ever heard Terry preach -- and this is not something I can say of any other minister I've heard, including my dad. Terry preaches a lot of the things I believe, and I try not to make that a deciding factor when choosing a church, but it does make it easier to sit through a sermon, let me tell you.

Anyway, I have never felt that the sermons were particularly dictated by the themes of the Worship Leader, but rather that the Worship Leader crafted the rest of the service to highlight the sermons.

(I'm rambling a bit, I know, but I need to present the whole cloth before I can start fashioning my final point.)

It's just this: the worship service is (I think) the defining role of a modern-day church. The worship service is what we DO as a church. It spawns lots of other things (Elderships and missions and youth groups and Bible classes and fellowship dinner), but all of these things develop because, first, we created a building and a congregation to participate together in the worship service.

(That's WHY if you had two Christians who attended different churches but, say, would go out together to perform good deeds and feed the poor, and support and encourage each other, and all the other social things Christians do, you'd still say they're members of different congregations. Because they attend different churches to observe the worship service.)

I'm fairly confident a church is defined by its worship service, and (as I said above) the Memorial church's worship service is exactly what I think it oughtn't to be -- an exquisitely crafted religiouslike experience. And yet (here's the challenging part), the church community seems to be exactly what I think a church community ought to be. They interact as Christians ought to interact. They are active in the world, apparently deliberately reshaping it to be more like the world God would want for Man, and they BELIEVE in God in a way I have rarely seen, even among my friends (let alone in churches!).

It bothers me. I would REALLY like to say that it's all because of Terry. The preacher does such a good job saying the right things (remember, I already said he says the things I believe) that the congregation can't HELP but hear his true meaning, and so they overcome the influence of the crafted worship service to actually experience Real Truth on their own.

I want to believe that, for the sake of the things I believe. I'm not so arrogant as to casually do that, though. It could be the...whaddyacallit...counterproof? Something like that. A test result directly contradicting a proposed hypothesis. It could be that the very existence of Trish's church proves me completely wrong.

I don't think that's the case, either. Rather, Trish's church seems to me to be an exception. A proof that Man can, in spite of his environment, twist just about anything into the shape he wants it to be. This church just happens to have enough people anxious enough to find Real Truth that they have taken the good and left the bad, and made this church into what they needed it to be, in spite of the inherent aspects of its methods that SHOULD have been obstacles.

I understand exceptions. I've told you recently that I'm a fairly pragmatic fellow, and the world constantly throws up exceptions to any good rule (it's part of my argument for social construction, and against logical naturalism). I'm thinking Trish's church is more like America -- a very successful, very admirable anomaly. That's no reason to build churches according to the example of Memorial, though, no more than it's a reason to endorse Democratic Anarchy according to the example of the U.S. It's just something to wonder at, I think.

I THINK. But, as I said, I recognize that it's a challenge to my beliefs, and I constantly assail that challenge, rather than simply writing it off as an anomaly. That's why I bring it up here. I'll let you see my thought process, see the way I consider and examine.

Ahp! I've said a lot, and I think I hit my main points pretty early on and then rambled where I should've done follow-through, so maybe this will have been a pretty useless article. I dunno. Comments will tell, I guess.

Greatness: Resources, Powers, and Good and Evil

Power is not good or evil. Power is a tool.

(Fantasy authors are obligated to devote at least one chapter in their first novel to this topic. Generally it is a discussion between an old, wise man, and a confused young hero.)

The metaphor generally goes something like this:
* A hammer is a useful tool for building things.
* A wicked man can use a hammer to kill another man.

Umm...that's the gist of it right there. A tool is not good or evil, it's just a method for Man to express his base nature (whether IT be good or evil). That fact begins with hammers and goes right on up to money and/or magic.

It frustrates me to see people with access to resources that they are unwilling to use, for fear that the resource will somehow taint them. No...that's not right. What frustrates me is that people can see very powerful resources being put to wicked use (money, political power, social networking), RECOGNIZE the power of those resources, and then (because wicked people are using them) these good people swear off those resources forever.

In other words, we see people using power in bad ways, and so we leave that power entirely in their grasp, and don't even try to use it in good ways.

There is some kind of social concept floating around, somewhere, about "legitimate" ways to achieve your ends, I guess. Praying for a new bicycle, I know, is strictly against the rules. Buying your way into Congress is, too, even though we know everyone in Congress got there that way.

I dunno. I'm more of a pragmatist than most, I guess. This world is what it is -- you're welcome to despise the unfairness of the systems of power and resources that it runs on, but unless you're willing to use those (for noble purposes), you'll always be at a wholly self-imposed disadvantage in your attempts to make things better.

Just...thoughts.

God: God's Divine Plan and the Meaning of Life

I've already told you the meaning of life (that is, the reason for this temporal existence). It's an opportunity for us to learn that Man's way doesn't work -- that striking out on our own is...unpleasant. Even with all the beauty and the love and goodness we DO manage to effect, the sum total of human independence is a life we DON'T want to live.

Life is a chance to learn that.

After all, most of the beauty and the love and the goodness are aspects of God in our lives ANYWAY, so living independently merely reduces the amount of it. And, that reduced amount doesn't make up for the genocide and the starving babies and etc.

So. Where, then, our interventionist God?

I'll say this: I don't believe God has an ultimate plan for the things that will happen in this world. I don't think he's in control, and I don't think he's trying to be. Oh, he's CAPABLE of it -- he's shown before and he shows again every day that there's nothing in this world so real that he can't bend or twist it to his needs. But, for the most part, he doesn't have much in the way of needs.

He needs a voice calling out his name, so that others will hear and remember what they already know. He needs a perfect life lived and a payment in blood to forgive on the infinite scale the mistakes made in this finite place. And that's been done. I think, pretty much, that's the plan. Oh, yeah! He needs people to be people (and learn why that doesn't work).

That's life, right there. That's God's divine plan for this world. I don't think God has a plan that involves where you work, or what color your baby's eyes are. Life is in OUR hands -- he gave us dominion over this world and it goes all the way. And -- rain on the just and the unjust -- he gave dominion to ALL of us. Not just the good ones.

I'll say it loud: God is not responsible for the state of this world. People are. People made this world.

God's not even responsible in an initial kinda way, because he didn't MAKE people in this world. He starts them out in Eden, and starts them out with a nature that will keep them there, but their own proud curiosity drives them (and, of course, by "them" I mean "us") out of Eden and into this world, which we then help make more like it is.

This world, the one we live in day to day, is not of God's making, but it (as a whole) fits within his plan for that other world, Infinity. Life is broken (we broke it), and that simple realization is an opportunity to learn why we should let go of it.

Does this all sound like I'm repeating myself? I'm actually trying to extend the argument to a conclusion. God's Plan has nothing to do with our day-to-day lives. If God controlled that -- if he exerted his dominion over how the world runs, and its general course -- then life wouldn't be able to serve the purpose it serves. It's not that he's an uncaring God (as some have said) and certainly not that he's an absent God. It's just that this life is doing what it was meant to do -- it's hurting as much as it heals. Which is a reminder that there's a world that doesn't hurt at all.

But what about prayer? I can practically hear you shoving each other out of the way to be the first to challenge me with that. Didn't I say I believed in prayer? Am I shoving God out of the world entirely now?

Not at all. There are two answers here, and the difference between them is kinda subtle. (Also, one of them presumes I've done a better job establishing the whole nature of constructed reality than I have, but I'll ignore that for now.)

First: people are born in Eden, entirely devoted to God's giving, and only through living learn to try to live outside of Eden, which enters them into this world, which is Man's dominion, not God's. By trusting yourself wholly to God, by walking in the light, as it has been said, you begin the process of removing yourself from Man's world and entering back into God's. Prayer for THINGS doesn't qualify as this -- asking God to work miracles and bend the reality that we think of as reality, that's insisting on staying within this reality but wanting it to be a better one.

But committing yourself to God, within this life, removes you mostly from it and entrusts your self to a world where God IS in complete control. That's what Eden is all about.

That's the first option. Your frame can be ambling around in the real world, while your spirit rests in God's dominion.

The other option is one I offered above as a possibility: miracles, powerful prayer, interventionist deity. And I believe in these things, and I think it's the only possible way to claim that God lets us run our own lives, but still loves us.

Because he's there as a safety net, as a protector, as a Providence. He gave us full control, but part of that control is the capacity to ask God to help out. He is very much there, and he is very much paying attention -- he's just not running the show. A mother watching her children perform a puppet show, maybe. She's paying attention and deliberately not interfering, for their sake, but she's still there in her full capacity as their mother, ready to step in and save them if they get hurt, or to correct them if they take this little play too far into wickedness.

It's a pleasant metaphor, and it gets a basic idea, but I'm not trusting it too far. Get the gist out of the image and then let it go, because it's not a whole parallel. Still, God is there, constantly, watching and listening and dearly loving us. He answers prayers, he changes things within this world (perhaps things we could change on our own, through magic or logic or technology, perhaps things we couldn't), but he doesn't guide its flow. He doesn't tell us what our world should be...or, rather, he did, once, and we saw it, and we shrugged, and we said, "Ehh, I could do better."

And that's this world. The other one is still there, waiting for us, and God DOES have an active hand in that world -- he's constantly maintaining it as the perfect residence for Man, and constantly inviting us back to it. We get to live in this sandbox of a Life for as long as we need to, to learn, and it's all ours, but God's is there, too, just as real, and always open.

God: The Call to Worship

Trish's church presents me with a real challenge....

Let me say this: the body has cravings. A body needs certain things to survive, and it expresses these needs to the mind as desire. I'm not trying to posit some clever point here, I'm just trying to state something we'll all agree on, so if you don't like that wording, rearrange it as necessary.

Sometimes you get hungry. You get hungry because you need nourishment for energy to keep on living. I don't mean to say "every time you get hungry, that time is because you need nourishment." What I mean, the reason animals get hungry at all, is because they need nourishment, and that craving is a message from the body to the brain.

Now let me go on to say this: people have a need for God in their lives. Again, I'm not ASSERTING that people have a need for God in their lives, whether they accept it or not, and advocating that we go out and add God to people's lives because they're ignorant....

They're not. That's exactly as likely as someone being unaware that they need food to go on living. Yes, it's a condition that occurs in some, but the vast majority of people KNOW when they have a need, whether or not they are able to fill that need in a responsible way.

So it is with God, and worship. Worship of God is something imposed on Man by the majesty of his (Man's) existence, not by the arrogant will of an egotistical God. We need, for health and happiness, to cry out to God in wonder and humility. We need to experience God's role in our lives, and actively step into his presence. We need to feel the divine blood coursing through us. There is a thirst in Man to experience such majesty.

And here is my concern with organized religion: it meets that need.

How many sermons have you heard stressing that, "Christianity is not what happens in this building...it's what happens when you go outside!" Why are all of those sermons necessary? If any of them worked, why would they keep getting preached?

If the need to experience God's majesty is like hunger, organized worship is like candy. It meets that need, in a most pleasant way. It satisfies your craving AND leaves you feeling good...but without the nutrients you need. Most of the time when you're hungry, it's not from lack of sugar and chocolate. It's from lack of vitamins, nutrients, but you can satisfy the craving without actually healing yourself. And so your Mom reminds you, all the time, "eat some vegetables." You buckle down and force yourself to eat some healthy food every now and then, because you know you've gotta, but when you get hungry, your desire is not for healthy food, but junk food.

Church is junk food. That's why we have preachers telling us over and over again, "Get out there and eat some vegetables." Church is a spectacle, crafted majesty. It's an opportunity to CREATE that feeling of being in God's presence (by just the right combination of socializing and ritualizing and performance, and DON'T get the mixture wrong or your whole congregation will rip apart). The thing is...that's a feeling you usually have to WORK for.

In real life, you have to devote yourself, day and night, to consideration of God and his holy message in order to get the kind of insight and understanding a preacher can hand you on Sunday morning. You have to step out of your comfort zone and get dirt on your hands helping strangers, helping the poor and sick and needy, to get the kind of spiritual high that church offers with a well-chosen selection of songs. You have to be prepared with an open heart and mind when you stumble upon the most amazing display of natural beauty, to get the kind of quiet joy that church just POURS into you....

An interesting thing about junk food is that it creates its own cravings. You learn to be hungry, not when your body needs nutrition, but when your body wants more junk food. And you confuse the two, and you begin to realize how hungry you always are, and how much that junk food satisfies your hunger, and suddenly it seems like that junk food is an important part of your diet (more important than the broccoli and sprouts that you're NEVER hungry for).

Church is like that. You hear people talk about how they couldn't make it through a week without the energy they get from church on Wednesday night. And I always sigh inside, because they're admitting their surrender. If they didn't have church on Wednesday night, they couldn't make it through the week without being HUNGRY for God.

And, I like to think, when they felt that hunger they'd go out and sate it. Not with some cheap, easy fix. Not with artificial preservatives (I'll have to do more with that line, sometime...), but tracking down and hunting real spiritual food. Actually loving and forgiving neighbors, actually experiencing God in this life, or understanding God's plan for the next.

I've also heard it said (although I can't personally attest) that when you really start eating healthy, your body starts to crave healthy food. And, suddenly, junk food isn't even attractive anymore. You can eat a little bit, but it mostly makes you uncomfortable.

I like that part about craving healthy food. I like it within the metaphor -- that if we were somehow driven to earnestly serve God (rather than to meet our own needs in a hall of worship), day in and day out, maybe some day we would learn to do that naturally, easy, to walk constantly in the presence of God. To experience his majesty throughout our life, not just in the individually packaged, Fun Size doses three times a week.

All that said, Trish's church presents me with a real challenge. I'll explain how another time.

God and Greatness: Attainable Virtue

It is a very good book, as I said before. It SUCKS, as I said before, but it is a very good book. You all have to read it, on pain of dire disgrace.

I liked this bit:
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God had said that it was only the men who could give up their jealous selves, their futile individualities of happiness and sorrow, who would die peacefully and enter the ring. He that would save his life was asked to lose it.

Yet there was something in the old white head which could not accept the godly view. Obviously you might cure a cancer of the womb by not having a womb in the first place. Sweeping and drastic remedies could cut out anything -- and life with the cut. Ideal advice, which nobody was built to follow, was no advice at all. Advising heaven to earth was useless.

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I love that last paragraph. Not the particular application to which it's put -- I just included that for context -- but the central idea. It's why I'm saying so much of what I'm trying to say -- why, even if the church WORKS as it is, we drastically need to revise what we do with it in our lives.

Any religion of Man which makes it evil to BE a Man, is doomed from the start (although, if human history is any example, destined to be quite popular). We can't HELP being people, we were made that way. It needs to be a starting point, not a destination avoided at all costs! Egads!

Anyway, I'm drained and spent. Stupid, stupid, stupid history! Danged dirty Mordred. If ever anyone needs a punch in the face, it was him. Seriously, this is worse than Gladiator (at least in that, it was Russel Crowe getting the whack). This is...Germanicus. Well...it's King Arthur. Real tragedy. Damn.

Go pick up a copy. Read it. We can share in the cursing.

This book sucks.

Greatness: The Seventh Sense

I have a quote for you today, a passage from "The Once and Future King." First, though, let me mention the book to you.

You should read it. You, personally, should read it, if you haven't already (or haven't otherwise made your own study of King Arthur's legend).

It's the story of King Arthur. It's actually (at least presented as) the STORY of "Le Morte d'Arthur," Mallory's ancient work on the legend. It is much more readable, HIGHLY political in nature (that is, the author uses the story to make some very deliberate and apparent points which I quite doubt are inherent to the legend), but still a very worthwhile read.

You have heard of King Arthur. It's really a good idea to learn something about the man. About the legend, rather, which is more meaningful in its way.

Also (and this perhaps more than all the rest I've said) there should be a LAW that no one is allowed to watch the movie "First Knight" unless they've first read "The Once and Future King." I mean that most earnestly! Dirty stinkin' movie....

*Mutter, grumble.*

Okay! On to the nature of Man, and the human experience:
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There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can't teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically--she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years. And then, when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living--not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She no longer hopes to live by seeking the truth--if women ever do hope this--but continues henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which she won when she first learned to walk, and now she has the seventh one--knowledge of the world.
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I don't think the author is being particularly sexist here--White refers to women so often in this passage because the characters under discussion are Guinever and Elaine--both young women. And the "seeking the truth" bit is a direct reference to the motives of Lancelot, who is the common link between them.

I like this passage a lot. I like the idea of developing a special sense of balance to get through life, even when it refuses to obey any logical rules. (For one thing, it makes me hopeful.) I have my doubts that the world is ever as logical as you guys all think it is.

White says that young people believe in order and rules, and older people give up on that (obviously that appears briefly in the quoted passage, but there is more detail on it later). I don't feel like I'm old before my time (which is a change, really -- for all of my childhood I felt that way, even through high school). But I think I see more chaos in life than most of you do. I like the idea of learning, with time and experience, not see some order beneath it, but just to find a way to weather it.

Also, I really like this passage because it feels like something I would write. The voice and the sentiment...it works for me.